


Dead Ebb

by bible



Category: The Pacific (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-22
Updated: 2015-07-22
Packaged: 2018-04-10 17:25:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4400792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bible/pseuds/bible
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It is low tide, dead ebb, the time when the sea washes back, leaving slick mudflats covered with straggled weed, rusty beer cans, rotted prophylactics, broken bottles, smashed buoys, and green-mossed skeletons in tattered bathing trunks. It’s dead ebb.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dead Ebb

**Author's Note:**

> Set right before the onslaught at Okinawa.

"Just go on dancing with me like this forever and I'll never tire. We'll scrape our shoe on the stars and hang upside down from the moon."

― Stephen King, _The Long Walk_

                When he was seven, Sledge witnessed his first death. He was on a short trip to the beach, the Gulf of Mexico lapping at the white sand of Gulf Shores, Alabama. Wet, loud, thunder-claps of waves hit the land and soaked it in effervescent foam. It was 1931, and the yawning expanse of burning bright sand was blank, the way a metal sheet left in the sun is. It just threw whiteness back into your eyes. Further along the shore, a cool band of blue ocean was intercepted by the neon sky. It was boiling hot that day. Many Americans thrown quickly into poverty were struggling to make a trip to the grocery store, much less the beach. The others that walked along the bay were only trying to make a living, while the Sledge family scattered among an empty patch of the beach to sprawl in the salty sun suspended over the sea.

                Eugene’s feet blistered as he padded, barefoot, through the sand. He had a chill, sweaty bottle of Coca-Cola in his hand, and as he sat in the waves, he pressed it between his thighs to provide some comfort to his sweating body. His insides were chattering with nerves, and he suddenly felt very irritable. Perhaps the day was too bright, or he was missing a bike ride in the cool shade of bending oak trees, or he was just mildly nauseated from the car ride. While he did not vocalize the desire to go home, he certainly felt it, and wrestled with the thought of staying where he was. The beach at Mobile was nicer.

The salt water roared over his thin legs and the glass bottle. Sledge settled on pouting in the blinding overhead light. A dull headache settled in his left temple; this detail he remembered, because when the throbbing pulse drifted to behind the nape of his neck, he saw it.

                It was strange, because the hand was facing palm-up, and Sledge always expected a dead body to float on its stomach in the ocean. He’d read somewhere that in the Dead Sea, anyone who’d accidentally roll on their stomachs would face a fatal noseful of burning salt water and a shortened span of air, because it was extremely hard to flip right-side up in the buoyant sea.

                Six men on a dock were tugging in a net of squirming, whiskered catfish. One boat bobbed in the distance on the rolling Caribbean, occupied by a dark-skinned fisherman protecting his eyes with a large hat. His mother was reading a torn-up paperback, and his brother hopped a wave. When the body washed upon the shore, the skin was soggy, like a wet napkin thrown over some bones. The lips were cracked and pale, and the eyes were blotted red and the irises were milky. Few strands of hair spurted from his scalp, long and iron-colored. He could not be older than forty. He was wearing grey overalls and one tough brown shoe.

                Instead of screaming, Sledge clenched his fists on the neck of his bottle and bit his lips, eyes wide. He felt his breath quicken, his heart pounding so hard that his birdcage ribs rattled in his chest. The cords in his neck stood out straight as he tensed. If Edward hadn’t seen the corpse and shrieked out a blasphemous call, perhaps no one would have known.

                “Jesus fuck, there’s a dead guy on the beach!”

                That memory was one S               ledge liked to avoid. He’d duck under it like a softball being thrown at him, and he’d carry on with his day, until it swung once again at the back of his head when he wasn’t looking. _No one wants to see a dead body_ , Sledge had thought once. But in the thirties, the news reported on the ruined Hoovervilles, and the papers depicted black and white photos of dirty, eviscerated bodies thrown over the stained cement. “Is that blood?” he’d asked his brother, who responded: “It ain’t molasses.” The famous American Dream shattered and overhung the starved children.

                And like the body at the beach, and the bodies of the poor, Sledge stared at the Japanese with the same dead-eyed, pragmatic gaze that one might stare at a sandwich being picked apart by ants.

                It wasn’t that Sledge was inhumane. He was just not as frightened by the typically horrifying as a child like Edward was. He tried to see that as an advantage in the war. But he was never used to it. You didn’t grow used to a dead body. He supposed even morticians were in for surprises. And you didn’t accept it either. You can’t accept the sight of a dead twenty-something with his mouth open in rage, speckled with bullet holes, a few tiny little craters in the skin.  You just deal with it. Step over the body, keep singing the song, and function mechanically until you can maybe drift to sleep when it’s not your watch in a foxhole and let all the guilt eat at you, all the shame, and the horror, and let your subconscious tell you that you’re completely and truly fucked.

                _But_ , Sledge asserted, _at least I don’t enjoy seeing deaths_. He had been frightened, of course. Not by a corpse, but by the conditions of a corpse. An American corpse saddened him. An American corpse with his own cock cut off and shoved into his mouth infuriated and devastated him. A Japanese corpse satisfied him. A Japanese corpse being pissed on disgusted him. The dead were dead, and they were finally on the same level. (Whether that was above humans or below seagull food was beyond Sledge. It was not something a kid could yet philosophize on. He still had much to learn about the war itself. But then, who could ever understand anything?)

                In the earlier days of Okinawa, when the expected Japanese bombardment was delayed, and K Company passed breastfeeding Okinawan women, pretty children fishing water from wells with buckets, small horses grazing in the sand, when a pale sun hung low in a salt sky, Snafu had stepped beside him, matching his trot, and asked him of death. The walks were long but undisturbed. As they listened for mortars, after a week with no sign of the Japanese, Snafu and Sledge had taken to short discussion.

                Sledge unscrewed his canteen and tipped it back, sweat and water beading on his chin. Snafu repeated the question. “Do you think I enjoy death?”

                Sledge looked at him, side-eyed. Snafu looked concerned, his eyebrows raised. Sweat speckled his strong jaw, glass beads of effort streaking down his neck. Any malice that Sledge had seen in him the first day, or that the enemy got a taste of in combat from the raging Cajun, had disappeared. “Are you trying to argue with me?”

                As Burgin enjoyed saying, Snafu could argue if the sun came up.

                “’Cause I really don’t have the energy right now, Snaf.”

                “No, sailor’s promise. Do you think I enjoy death?”

                Sledge wracked his brain. No, he wasn’t like Mac, who relieved himself with a slimy grin onto the corpses. Snafu seemed more angry than maleficent. But then, wasn’t everyone? Snafu stripped corpses—but not of their trousers.

                “No. But I think you’re good at dealing it out.”

                He chuckled a little, and the slight apprehension drained from him. On cue, his friend became a hardened Marine again. “Do you think I’m scared of death?”

                “Absolutely fucking not,” Sledge answered immediately, and harvested a pack of Pall Malls from his jacket. He held it out, and as Snafu pulled one free, Sledge observed, “You’re afraid of the dark, though.”

                His pale lips stretched around the end of the cigarette. He was thinking, and for a moment, silence fell upon the two. Then he decidedly spoke. “It is low tide, dead ebb, the time when the sea washes back, leaving slick mudflats covered with straggled weed, rusty beer cans, rotted prophylactics, broken bottles, smashed buoys, and green-mossed skeletons in tattered bathing trunks. It’s dead ebb,” Snafu said grimly.

                Sledge convulsed, a moment longer than a twitch. “Those things surface in the day.”

                “Yeah,” Snafu shot a glance to the ocean, and sucked on a cigarette, which steamed its essence. “But in the day, there are people around to stop it. You know what? I’ve never felt safer at night than I do in the Corps.”

                Sledge softly laughed, his tired eyes lowering for a moment. He’d been walking asleep for a while. “The dark provides isolation.”

                “And a foxhole provides someone to save your sorry ass. I never did sleep much.”

                “Is that why you’ve always been insane?”

                “Insane? Shit, I’ve never been saner. We know everything there is to know about life and death now. When it happens, how it measures up, how it happens, what happens after, the last thoughts, rippling pain. Somewhere in the world, a person is upset because their Coca-Cola is warm. That’s insane. _That’s_ insane.” His voice was pallid and empty. The smell of shroud was on him.

                The smell of shroud was on them all.             

                Sledge chuckled weakly in spite. “It’s insane that any person should endure these conditions, don’t you think? Humans weren’t made to trudge through the boiling heat, sweating the dirt off that’s caked to their bodies. Humans weren’t made to pump ammo into other humans. Humans weren’t designed to kill.”

                Jay fell in step with them, his short frame seemingly misplaced beside Snafu, like a teenager ushered into a club. “I don’t think so. I think when humans were made, their muscles were engineered to kill and run and survive. Not flourish. I don’t think biology ever intended for us to need to lose weight. That’s why we find the muscular and the thin conventionally attractive, y’know?  Instinct or whatever. Defined muscles and small frames mean that the potential partner’s… She’s a hunter herself. Same reason we find tits attractive. Means they can feed the child. Means they’re fit to be bred. We’re all animals, aren’t we? It’s not like we think those things now, but it’s in our DNA.”

                “Jay,” Snafu said, long in the way that Cajuns made words. Smoky and stretched and deep. “We were having a _private_ conversation.”

                “’sides,” Sledge added, “Tons of people like the curvier ladies. Ain’t that right, Snafu?”

                Snafu twitched, and exhaled a cloud aromatic of tobacco and the sea and concentrate beef. “Not Snafu.” He’d taken to referring to himself in third person on the odd occasion, as if prepared to write a book on his experiences, tossing the idea of writing styles in his mouth as he experienced the subject matter. “Snafu likes sharp bones and high hips, Jay.”

                “My point is,” Jay said, “I think this is normal. Not the machinery and the constant gunsnaps. But physically? I think people back home got too much to complain about. You saw them ladies with the juice, right? My, what a mess.”

                He shook his head, as if solemn. Sledge laughed, “Guess you’re right. Anyone from the states downed that battery acid junk, they’d want a full refund! We’re made to appreciate it. And you know what? I did. I truly did.”

                “I appreciated the view a whole lot, too.”

                Snafu grunted. He’d lost the introspective current. Jay washed it down, Sledge supposed. And on went the walk. Sledge decided that he enjoyed it. While sweat poured down his back, down his thighs, darkening the cloth of the uniform, he only had one focus. Picking them up and putting them down. Right foot, left foot, right foot, left foot. If he didn’t enjoy it, he dealt with it. Perhaps everything was simply better than the ultimate alternative.

                That made everything easier. Even his boots (wet with pus, socks clinging to his open blisters) were drier than they’d been in a while. His canteen sloshed at his hip. He had not a spot of blood on his skin. He was freshly shaven. Heavenly, he thought. This is heavenly. And the seven-year-old Sledge pouting over his Coca-Cola melted the same way he had when the body washed ashore.

                He’d seen it all—wasn’t that the cliché? But he walked with a pylon of electrical energy that buzzed his body, pumping him with adrenaline. It never seemed to fade. Of course he hadn’t seen it all. With every new horror the war threw at him, the emotions rolled through. The screaming that ripped through his chest. The panting, the grit teeth, the nighttime thrashing, the tainted sleep. The enemy had no face any more, sure. It was a demanding thing. A horrible, all consuming mass that wanted blood, which slit its own throat, which roared and pleaded and painted the sky a terrible, swirling red. The early morning sun. Bathing the white salt sky in red flares. The red was on them all.

                But he hadn’t seen it all.

                It seemed that no matter what direction he took in action or word, the long term outcome was the wretched subject of death. Even trudging along the path, Sledge took a look at the giant moth shadows the sun threw to the right, and thought, _I could lay down right there, and I could sit in my own death, and stink as I slip into unconsciousness in Okinawa. Just let sun mottle my vision. Let my limbs ache no more. Let the sun ruin me instead of the torturous enemy_. But on he walked.

                He walked for many things. For the men suffering in the camps. For the security back home, so the spoiled could continue whining over soda. They may be aggravating, but he could not face a threat of their ruin due to the wild Japanese. To preserve history. To preserve reading. To preserve virginity of the Chinese women, the Okinawan women. (Girls, even, he remembered with a shudder.) On he walked.

                Mostly, he walked for Snafu. Ahead, his foxhole partner continued on, his face haggard and worn. Nothing like Peleliu. He looked tired, that was all. And disappointed. He fought for Snafu, because Snafu fought for him. Snafu lived to protect Sledge, so Sledge would do the same. That was the easiest way to go on. Perhaps, if Snafu was shot—a chilling thought—Sledge could lay down his rifle, and he could drift into a beautiful sunstroke.

                “Beautiful day, huh?” Sledge tried.

                “Well, I got a breeze ‘cross my nose, and a bandage on my ankle, and dry socks, so it sure is,” Snafu did not sound sardonic in the least. He spoke blankly, the way his face looked. Tall pines tapped a windy message against the roof of a cabin, where a short Okinawan woman hung a thick woven wrap on a clothesline. Snafu nodded, “Beautiful day.”

                Another daytime breeze blew in from the sea, flourishing the white cloth like the Japanese flag if it were bleached. Snafu reached for Sledge’s hand, squeezed the dry, cracked appendage once, his thick ring pressing into Snafu’s knuckles, and leaned down. He whispered, “Stop thinking. Try to be happy here. Try to like me a little, would you?” Cajun, it sounded: _wouldja_?

                “I like you already,” Sledge said, and ran his thumb over his hand. It almost hurt, how touched he was. “More than this war. I can’t be happy here.”

                Sledge looked at Snafu’s tight mouth once and understood. This war was another circle of death-worship and the participants were occupied with their own death-wish.

                “Christ on a cross, Sledge!” Snafu cried, dropping his hand, “No shit!”

                “There it is!” Sledge laughed hysterically, “I was waiting for the argument to spur. Can’t go a day without disagreeing, can you?”

                Snafu’s voice dropped to a hiss. “You’re all that makes me an iota happy in this hell, can’t you just give the brooding a rest for one minute? I need to talk to you. And for once, I don’t want it to be about death. And I know that’s a hard fucking topic to avoid, but—oh, Sledgehammer.”

                He sounded awfully tired. Sledge didn’t like it. He could go crazy with that tone of defeat. Was that what _he_ sounded like? Again, they fell silent. It seemed odd to Sledge that an island back, Snafu found the gall to proclaim that no one was to return home.

                Perhaps they were all aware of this.

                Perhaps Snafu tired of dwelling on this notion.

                Sand dust eddied about Sledge’s feet where he walked in the misty forest shade skimming the road's edge. The sun was white in a milkglass sky. Passing a shallow creek rushing swift and cool from the woods, he paused, tempted to take off his tight shoes and go wading where soggy leaves rotated wildly in pebbled whirlpools.

                Finally, as the day slid past the nighttime horizon, and the night reached is apogee, they sunk in for the night into foxholes, preparing for an onslaught, as they had the four days prior. As Snafu settled in for sleep in the blue evening, Sledge draped his arms over the rim of the canal, his nails curling in the thick opium dirt, wet and cool. A large white ant shuffled manically through the path he’d drawn with his nail. Poor ant. Just kept picking them up and putting them down.

                He squished it under his thumb.

                “Sledgehammer.”

                He turned to Snafu, whose eyes were half-mast, worn in the deep day. “What is it, Snafu?”

                “Kiss me.”

                Sledge sighed. “You just can’t get enough, can you? Two battles—three for you—and you’re still popping out these demands. What are you waiting for? You might as well be wearing a PUNCH ME IN THE MOUTH sign on your back.”

                “It’s actually,” _acsh’lly_ , “a shoot me in the face sign. All these Japs are trying their hardest. It’s called a uniform.”

                Sledge chuckled, bewildered.

                “I’m serious, though. You so occupied with death and you’re only twenty.” _Twunny_.  “Let me kiss you. You haven’t been in forever. If at all. You get any girls back in Mobile?”

                “Knock it off, Snafu, I mean it.” The humor was gone from Sledge’s voice. He sounded like a vicious son of a bitch again, in dog-tags and jackboots. Snafu sank back on his elbows, his face hooded by his helmet, shaded save for a scraggly quirk of a smile, and stubble darkened his face even more. He was an energetic smoggy smear.

                Sledge stared after him, uncertain and mystified. His foot sank out from his crouch, and he slid deeper into the foxhole, chewing on his tongue. “Snafu.”

                Sledge first kissed a girl when he was thirteen, a tomboy neighbor of his that was fishing with him by the lake. And he wanted to touch her, to put his arms around her, for this seemed suddenly the only means of expressing all he felt. Pressing closer, he reached and, with breathtaking delicacy, kissed her cheek. There was a hush; tenuous moods of light and shade seemed to pass between them like the leaf-shadow trembling on their bodies. Then she tightened all over. She grabbed hold of his hair and started to pull, and when she did this, a terrible and puzzled rage went through Eugene.

                “Snafu, you queer?”

                He laughed, a loud bark. “Nah, but I certainly don’t have one hand tied behind my back.”

                For a good few minutes, they stared at each other uneasily, and Sledge, in his fatigues and heavy pack, thought of how good it would be, to sink down in the foxhole, and wind his arms around Snafu’s strong neck, to rest his legs in a warm space between Snafu’s, to be held, and kissed, and loved. It ached through him, and he almost cried, the heat needling behind his eyes. But he did not, and instead, took off Snafu’s helmet, and hushed him, though he was not saying anything.

                Snafu’s lips felt dry and split, and his breath was rancid, his stubble almost painful against Sledge’s mostly-bare face. The kiss hurt. Snafu bit into his bottom lip, wakening a patched, white spot of dried skin that had just healed over a blister. Sledge pressed too close, and their noses bumped together. It was unbelievably wonderful.

                Sledge brought a hand to his grizzled cheek, mindful to be quiet, in case a Marine dropped in with a codeword on his tongue. Under the pastel sky, frightening and apocalyptic with the smoky overhead glow, Sledge kissed his foxhole partner with a quiet ferventness that bordered on desperate. They reached for each other, their mouths open and wide, breathing patterns stunted. Sledge did indeed fit himself into his embrace, sweaty but warm.

                When Sledge pulled back, the sky cracked. Thunder snapped, and the air smelled distinctly of ozone. Sledge breathed hard, his heart jackrabbiting in his chest. He had been affected by the unspeakable in the past year. He had yet to be rattled by something as good and primitive as this. It was refreshing, like biting into a pear, juice dripping off your chin. Like sinking into a pond after a hot day, feet dragging in the cool mud while oak tree branches shaded overhead. A gut wrenching, sane, needy kind of pleasure that tugged at the tight spot in your chest. He felt no wrongness, and if he felt as if he needed to own up for something, it was the watch. As if now the Japanese would find it the right time to spring.

                Snafu slid a hand up his neck, sweaty and dirty, and pressed gently at the tight cords, kneading the skin. Sledge breathed deep, heavy, the thickness of the air between them drowning him, the same pond water. So thick it was almost palpable as fog. It was good, so good. Sledge’s bottom lip quivered before he took Snafu’s between his once more.

                And the springtime sky was filled with stars and a half-moon pulling the tides. They glided as quiet and alone as a ship on the sea. Tucked amid the green pines, the foxhole was no more than a familiar contour of the wartime battlefield. But inside, Snafu, seeking forgiveness and the restoration of equilibrium, bent down so their faces were on the same plane, and said against his mouth, “Don’t pick up my habits.”

                In the flow of his innermost thoughts, Sledge kissed without hesitation, the movements appearing by destiny, with no consciousness behind them, the need having existed there between the two men from the beginning of time and needing only their willingness to materialize. “What?” Sledge gasped, not much of a question, “Afraid you’ll ruin me?”

                He almost wept, “It ain’t your fault, Snafu. All the ultimatums I talk about, they aren’t seeded in my mind by you. Not even Haldane. You know exactly where they come from. And while I appreciate you takin’ the blame, I swear to Christ, you ain’t even a small factor of it. You keep me from—from…”

                “Fuck, Eugene, if that’s what it takes to keep you from doing something stupid, I’ll keep on picking ‘em off ‘til it’s over.”

                “And then?”

                “And then… And then we’ll meet again.”


End file.
